Jack Rosenthal sends Maureen Lipman a text from beyond the grave

Maureen Lipman has received a surprising text message from her late husband,
Jack Rosenthal.

The stage and screen actress Maureen Lipman. Photo: Andrew Crowley

By Tim Walker. Edited by Claire Fox.

6:30AM GMT 07 Mar 2011

After a quarter of Britons were last week reported to have been happy to admit to having had supernatural experiences, Maureen Lipman and Will Young have been telling Mandrake about theirs.

Lipman, the distinguished 64-year-old stage and screen actress, tells me that she believes she was admonished by her late husband, the playwright Jack Rosenthal, in an eerie posthumous text message.

“Our son, Adam, showed me the first draft of a novel he had been writing, and I criticised it,” Lipman told me at a party at the National Theatre to celebrate the launch of John Fraser’s new book, The Unholy Trinity of Monstrous Madonnas.

“One of the characters in the novel was called Enk and later that day I was fiddling with my phone and a text message popped up from Jack. It said: 'The lad’s done well - Enk’.

“I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how it happened, but there was Jack’s name. Of course, it could have been an old message he had sent me that I had kept that had got mangled, but God only knows. I felt it was Jack’s way of telling me – 'Our boy’s doing all right. Leave him alone’.”

Meanwhile, the singer and actor Will Young, who is starring in the supernatural television series Bedlam, tells me he believes he is co-habiting with a ghost. “Sometimes pictures turn upside down and there have been times when my dog won’t go into certain rooms. He just stands outside and barks.”

The bewigged 32-year-old star is not unduly worried, however. “It is a friendly ghost,” he says.